Learn more about Lorenzo Polvani and his research
Lorenzo Polvani is the Maurice Ewing and J. Lamar Worzel Professor of Geophysics in the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics at Columbia Engineering. He is particularly interested in quantifying and distinguishing the effects of anthropogenic forcings from natural climate variability.
ABOUT THE STUDY
JOURNAL: PNAS
TITLE: "The Montreal Protocol is delaying the occurrence of the first ice-free Arctic summer"
AUTHORS: Mark R. England (1) and Lorenzo M. Polvani (2)
- Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, UC Santa Cruz; now at the University of Exeter
- Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics, and Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University
FUNDING: This research was funded by a grant from the US National Science Foundation to Columbia University. The authors declare no financial or other conflicts of interest.
ABOUT THE STUDY
JOURNAL: PNAS
TITLE: "Implicit learning of convective organization explains precipitation stochasticity"
AUTHORS: Sara Shamekh, Kara Lamb, Yu Huang, Pierre Gentine
Department of Earth of Environmental Engineering, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA
FUNDING: The study was supported by: SS and PG acknowledge funding from European Research Council grant USMILE, from Schmidt Future project M2LiNES and from the National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center (STC) Learning the Earth with Artificial intelligence and Physics (LEAP), Award 2019625 - STC. KDL acknowledges support from LEAP and DOE Grant DE-SC0022323 ``Discovering Physically Meaningful Structures from Climate Extreme Data."
The authors declare no financial or other conflicts of interest.
Radical New Thinking for Our Water Crisis
Upmanu Lall: Innovative new approaches are needed for ensuring drinking water standards are met.
NSBE Celebration
Photo highlights from the event
Columbia Engineering’s Class of 2023 showcased their inventive solutions to challenging problems at the 8th annual Senior Design Expo. Projects varied from an approach that aims to reinvent IV (intravenous) administration for NICU patients to a novel capture system to remove space debris. More than 50 teams spanning eight departments presented their innovations and research at a packed showcase held May 4 at Roone Arledge Auditorium to a crowd of peers, professors, alumni, and STEM enthusiasts.
The biomedical engineering team behind NuJet (Anjali Nair, Isa Nuñez, Athena Pagon, Vish Rao, Elías Tzoc-Pacheo), attempted to solve the need for a cost-effective vaccine delivery to make vaccines more accessible, sustainable, and sanitary.
“Syringes and needles are the most common form of vaccine delivery, despite many of the components being single-use,” said Pagon.
On top of this, there are strict storage, transportation and disposal requirements, leading to a high-cost model that is typically only accessible in high resource centers. Their solution, a low-cost needle-less injector, generates a pressurized fluid stream that delivers the vaccine right below the skin while reducing cross-contamination, waste, and cost.
Inspired by individuals who suffer from overstimulation and anxiety, the electrical engineering students behind Musical Meditation (Tess Fallon, Alexandr Petuhov, Leonardo Arvan, Madeline Denis) developed a pair of headphones that reads the user's heart rate, while playing calming music that adjusts itself in an attempt to slow down the person’s heartbeat.
Some designs focused on improving existing solutions. AMPF, also known as the Automated Pothole Filler (Jose Chanchavac, Phillipe Dumeny, Javier Lopez, Jerry Qu, Justin Tucker) aimed to simplify the process of filling potholes, which typically requires work from a large team of workers, typically five to 10 people at a time. “Our solution greatly reduces the number of people needed to about one to two workers,” said Javier Lopez, who recently received a degree in mechanical engineering. While AMPF focused on earthly solutions, DEMI (Miles Huntley-Fenner, Christina Wrightm Yidi Reiss, Leon Aharonian, Nicolas Aldana) focused on safely securing space debris, also known as space junk, which poses a serious threat to the welfare and sustainability of orbital activities. Their two-stage capture system encloses the debris and seals it in a storage chamber, which is something that other solutions lack.
Sustainability was a common theme among many projects, with the expectation of improving systems that currently affect the environment. AQUA4 (Anton Deti, Emily Milian, Itai Savin, Kennedi Wade) developed a water rerouting system that repurposes water used in the bathroom. Students from the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering researched how best to treat contaminated soil in New York City, with hopes to rid the soil of harmful metals such as lead and arsenic (Mantjita Camara, Emily Lord, Dane Miller).
Many civil engineering models were built this year with sustainability in mind, from re-designing Dam systems to better serve the flora and fauna of the surrounding area (Ruben Bazalar, Caroline Cailloux, Kevin Cardenas, Yunus Kovankaya, Zhihao Liu, Ariana Novo) to cost-effective Brooklyn housing made entirely of recycled shipping containers (Charlie Henry Renner, Abraham Oh, Katherine Koziol, Amin Mojarad, Isabella Citera, Tes S DeJaeger).
Other visionary projects aimed to improve skills, through games and physical exercise. With focus on creativity, the students behind ZyloZinger (Sienna Brent, Alex Yu, Haris Zia) created an interactive xylophone game that challenges hand-eye coordination. In an effort to improve athletic training, Deadliftr (Yelaman Sain, Kyrie Lorfing, Matt Klenk, Sam Wustefeld, Will Hamilton) aimed to develop a device to help weightlifters on their deadlift training, creating a wireless device that gives athletes real-time feedback on their form.
“I feel inspired and energized by all of the inventive projects on display here today and I know the rest of you feel the same,” said Dean Shih-Fu Chang in his address preceding the event. “It truly shows how creative our field of engineering and applied science is and our commitment to being engineers for humanity.”